NEW YORK — “Sometimes,” says Stephen King, “it’s alive.”

Not the hungry king vampire of his early novel, “Salem’s Lot.” Not the ancient evil of “It” or the more recent “Desperation.” Not even the decidedly displeased ghost of his latest effort, a gothic tale called “Bag of Bones.”

Sometimes, says modern fiction’s most prolific horror writer, an author’s tools — narrative skill, adeptness with dialogue, ability to spin a tale — don’t matter, because the story gets up and starts walking around.

The moral: Twenty-five years after his first novel, “Carrie,” the Mainer who has become the modern H.P Lovecraft still likes to stand back and see what happens when he lets the things he creates carry him off into the night.

The result often satisfies him, though not all critics, who say he often lets himself be carried off too far.

“I think of it as the takeoff point — when the wheels leave the ground. It comes to life,” says King, 51. “You have confidence that the story lines will come together.”

In “Bag of Bones,” they did, albeit convolutedly. King’s newest, a fat tome written in the first person, chronicles the torturous life of author Mike Noonan, creatively crippled since the inexplicable death of his wife, Jo. Drawn to their vacation cottage on a ghostly Maine lake, Noonan finds solace in the company of a young widow and her daughter — and faces dangers both earthly and supernatural.

King, a schoolteacher who grew into one of the most popular horror novelists ever, has long been both a darling of best-seller lists and a critical target. While readers voraciously buy up his words, he fends off charges of everything from shallowness to self-indulgence to just plain lack of talent.

“Bag of Bones” seems an attempt to add weight — and thus credibility — to his body of work. Of late, as his pendulum swung to more everyday horrors, King experimented with everything from a narrowly focused psychosexual tale (“Gerald’s Game”) to marital discord and perseverance (“Dolores Claiborne”). With “Bag of Bones,” he brings the worldly and the unearthly together.

It is also classic gothic. Eerie cottages creak and groan. Ectoplasm oozes. Ghosts haunt. Old injustices are unearthed and horrible compromises are made. But below it all, one very secular terror reigns: Mike Noonan still can’t write.

Gee, Steve. Author angst. Didn’t you explore that pretty thoroughly in “The Shining,” “Misery” and “The Dark Half”? Getting narcissistic?

“I’ll give you this much,” King says on a recent publicity tour. “I don’t think there’s any need to write any more books about writers. I think I’ve said all I need to say about that.”

What King does love to discuss is writing — his, others’, the craft in general, where it’s headed. He’s at a loss when he goes to author appearances and gets the weirdest questions that have little to do with writing: Was he abused as a child? Is that why he concocts such dark tales?

“That’s self-indulgent,” he says. “I should not have to go out on these tours and sell Stephen King.”

But he does have to sell himself these days, because he has a new boss. After departing Viking, his longtime publisher, he’s now one of Scribner’s marquee names. But to hear King tell it, he’d rather have his work do the talking.

Years ago, King concocted a quote that preceded one of his novellas: “It is the tale, not he who tells it.” He still tries to observe that credo, though many have said — in both admiration and scorn — that his writerly mark on his work is too heavy-handed.

“If it’s going to be he who tells it, not the tale, tell it on a psychiatrist’s couch. Don’t try to sell it for $28 at Barnes & Noble,” King says. “The bottom line is, can you read it on an airplane? Can you read it on a train? Are you going to stay up an extra hour when you need your sleep to read a little more? If you can say yes, it’s because of the tale.”

Critics say he needs a more aggressive editor, that his prose is fat; they have a point, although his indulgences are, more often than not, redeemed by his compelling narratives and the folks who populate them.

More galling for King (who harbors no illusions about the permanence of his work) are the accusations that he cooks up the convenience-store burritos of American literature. For King, to whom sense of place runs a close second to character and story, setting means evoking the modern world — through brand names and corporate specifics that have often brought the criticism of the elite down upon his Yankee head.

This isn’t necessarily a problem for a man who once called himself a “Big-Mac-and-fries-type writer” — a man who has more than a dash of the pulpy “Vault of Horror” approach to storytelling.

“I was taught as a writer to be specific,” he says. “Critics would go into these frenzies about how it was a knee-jerk, shallow, pop view of the world. And I would think, `What do these people see when they open their medicine cabinet? Do they see Brand X?’

“This wasn’t my innovation, but I got the most attention out of it. People maybe thought, `This isn’t good writing because it doesn’t tell about a good world.’ But we’re a McDonald’s world. Don’t blame me for it. I’m a product of my culture and my time.”

Forget, then, the tortured author sitting in a secluded room producing prose, though certainly that is part of the King creative process. Think, instead, of Stephen King, scribe of the commercial age, working out at the Y in Bangor, Maine, thinking about his new book.

Think of him finishing a set of sit-ups — or was it chin-ups? He can’t recall — when it occurs to him to send someone to the rescue of a young woman and a child.

That, coupled with his earlier idea of “a house, an old crime and buried bodies” brought the story to its critical mass. That was when it all came together and the bag of bones came to life — the takeoff point, the moment when the wheels left the ground.

An odd metaphor, by the way. Because Stephen King, chronicler of modern angst, creator of a thousand unspeakable terrors, is afraid of flying.

And maybe, though he doesn’t admit it, of falling flat.

After all, Stephen King isn’t necessarily a big Stephen King fan — with a few exceptions.

“I really like `The Dead Zone.’ It has an arc,” King says. “And I like `The Green Mile,”‘ his serialized story about death row in the 1930s. Then he smirks.

“A lot of the other ones … all I can say is that I liked them at the time.”